Rachel’s’ hands were beginning to ache, but she couldn’t seem to loosen her grip. “I...always wondered what Roger was doing here that night. Do you think he was watching for me? Spying to see if I was going to meet you?”
Lucas shot her a quick, searching look. “Some people said I lured him here so I could push him off the bluffs.”
“I know what some people said.”
His fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “You didn’t believe them?”
“If there had been one shred of evidence against you, Chief Packer would have put you behind bars. And, besides, you weren’t even here that night.”
Roger had most definitely been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Rachel thought sadly. If he’d been trying to catch Lucas slipping around to meet someone, he should have been watching Lizzie Carpenter’s house.
Lucas didn’t seem particularly satisfied with Rachel’s answer. Without moving, he watched the rain,
his thoughts seeming very far away.
Rachel was trying to think of something to say to break the silence when Lucas finally spoke again. “You never told your mother about us?”
Her mother would have totally freaked out. Jane had bitterly disliked all McBrides after her husband ran off with Lucas’s stepmother.
“I never told anyone about us.” Not her family, not her closest friends...no one.
While they were together, Lucas had been Rachel’s cherished secret. The secrecy had made their relationship seem even more romantic and magical.
She’d sat in her classrooms, bored with the teachers’ lectures, daydreaming about the day she and Lucas would surprise everyone by announcing their love for each other. Or maybe they would elope, she’d fantasized. They would return to Honoria as Mr. and Mrs. Lucas McBride, and all the girls would be so envious that quiet, shy, good-girl Rachel Jennings had caught the most exciting, daring, dangerous bad boy in town.
Had she really been that naive and foolish?
She had grown up fast the day she’d been told her brother was dead—and that the only reason Lucas hadn’t been arrested for his murder was because he’d spent that fateful night in Lizzie Carpenter’s bed.
And then he’d left town, without a word. He’d abandoned her at the lowest point of her young life, leaving her with a devastated, embittered mother and a secret that had become more tragic than romantic.
She could forgive him for most of the things he’d done—maybe she could even forgive him for Lizzie—but she still couldn’t remember his leaving the way he had without being overwhelmed by a wave of betrayal.
Shouldn’t she have gotten past that by now? It had been so long ago. They’d both gotten older. She wasn’t sure, however, that she had gotten much wiser. If she had, why was she sitting here now with Lucas McBride?
Maybe a similar thought crossed his mind. He reached for the ignition and started the car. “It’s getting late. I’ll take you home.”
Home. Rachel mulled the word over in her mind as he drove. Where was home? Certainly not her grandmother’s house, though that was where she’d lived from the time her father had abandoned his family when she was only nine until she’d left for college nine years later. The functional, few-frills apartment she maintained in Atlanta had never really had the feel of “home.” It was just a place to live.
“Home” wasn’t a place, she’d always heard, but a feeling. Rachel had been waiting a long time to find a refuge to call home. She’d begun to wonder lately if she ever would.
Lucas had always had an uncanny ability to sense what she was thinking. “What’s your life like in Atlanta?”
“Quiet,” she answered after a moment. “Peaceful. I have a good job, a nice apartment, a few good friends.”
“Is that all you want?”
Something about his question made her defensive. Okay, so maybe her life at thirty-three was much different from her daydreams at eighteen. But it wasn’t all that bad. She had made her choices, and she was content with them, for the most part.
“It’s all I want for now,” she answered a bit shortly.
It was still raining when Lucas drove into the driveway of her grandmother’s house.
“Hold on a minute,” he said, reaching over the back of his seat into the tiny storage space behind. He pulled out an umbrella. “Sit tight, I’ll come around.”
“I can make a run for it,” she protested, reaching for her door handle. “There’s no need for you to get out.”
“Stay,” he said, and opened his door.